Museum für Naturkunde

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Skeleton of Brachiosaurus brancai

The Museum für Naturkunde (in English, the Museum of Natural History), widely known as the Naturkundemuseum, seldom as Humboldt Museum of Berlin. It has a massive collection of more than 25 million zoological, paleontological, and minerological specimens, including more than ten thousand type specimens. It is most famous for two spectacular exhibits: the largest mounted dinosaur in the world, and the most exquisitely preserved specimen of the earliest known bird, Archaeopteryx.

This is the largest museum of natural history in Germany, and part of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, which was established in 1810. Its collections contain objects from three major fields, paleontology, mineralogy, and zoology. The museum's mineral collections date back as early as to the Prussian Academy in 1700. Significant zoological specimens were recovered for example by the German deep-sea expedition Valdiva (1898–99), by the German Southpolar Expedition (1901–03), and by the German Sunda Expedition (1929–31). Expeditions to fossil beds in Tendaguru in former Deutsch Ostafrika (today Tanzania) unearthed rich paleontological treasures. The collections are so extensive that less than 1 in 300 specimens is actually exhibited, and they attract researchers from around the world.

Additional exhibits include a mineral collection representing 75% of the minerals in the world, a large meteor collection, the largest piece of amber in the world; exhibits of the now-extinct quagga and tasmanian tiger, and "Bobby" the gorilla, a Berlin Zoo celebrity from the 1920s and 1930s.

1 Giant bones
2 Bird with teeth
3 History
4 Footnotes
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Giant bones

The specimen of Brachiosaurus (or Giraffatitan) brancai^[1] in the central exhibit hall is the largest mounted dinosaur skeleton in the world.

It is composed of fossilized bones recovered by the German paleontologist Werner Janensch from the fossil-rich Tendaguru beds of Tanzania between 1909 and 1913. The remains are primarily from one gigantic animal, except for a few tail bones (caudal vertebrae) which belong to another animal of the same size and species.

The mount is 12.72 m (41 ft 5 in) tall, and 22.25 m (73 ft) long until 2005. When living, the long-tailed, long-necked herbivore probably weighed 50 t (55 tons). While the Diplodocus carnegiei mounted at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, United States actually exceeds it in length (27 m, or 90 ft), the Berlin specimen is taller, and far more massive.

[edit] Bird with teeth

The "Berlin Specimen" of Archaeopteryx lithographica (HMN 1880), is also displayed in the central exhibit hall. The dinosaur-like body with an attached tooth-filled head, wings, claws, long lizard-like tail, and the clear impression of feathers in the surrounding stone is strong evidence of the link between reptiles and birds. The Archaeopteryx is a transitional fossil; and the time of its discovery was apt: coming on the heels of Darwin's 1859 magnum opus, The Origin of Species, made it quite possibly the most famous fossil in the world.

Recovered from the German Solnhofen limestone beds in 1880, it is only the third Archaeopteryx to be discovered and the most complete. The first specimen, a single 150 million year old feather found in 1860, is also in the possession of the museum.

[edit] History

Minerals in the museum were originally part of the collection of instructors from the Berlin Mining Academy. The University of Berlin was founded in 1810, and acquired the first of these collections in 1814, under the aegis of the new Museum of Mineralogy. In 1857, the paleontology department was founded, and 1854 a department of petrography and general geology was added.

By 1886 the University was overflowing with collections, so design began on a new building nearby at Invalidenstraße 43, which opened as the Museum of Natural History in 1889.

The collections were damaged by the Allied bombing of Berlin during World War II. The eastern wing was severely damaged, and is only now in the process of being rebuilt. From 2010, is is planned to house the entire alcohol collections in the east wing under fully modern conditions of specimen storage.

In 1993, after the shake-up caused by the reunification of Germany, the museum split into the three divisions: The Institutes of Mineralogy, Zoology, and Paleontology. Further important changes in 2006 saw the appointment of a Director General and the replacement of the former institutes with a division into Collections, Research and Exhibitions. From 2009 the Museum will join the Leibniz-Gemeinschaft.

[edit] Footnotes

^ Gregory S. Paul formally moved the Brachiosaurus brancai species to a new subgenus (Giraffatitan) in 1988, and George Olshevsky promoted the new taxa to genus in 1991. This has not been widely accepted in the literature, and as of 2007 the museum's labels still use the old genus name.

[edit] References

Olshevsky, G. (1991). "A Revision of the Parainfraclass Archosauria Cope, 1869, Excluding the Advanced Crocodylia". Mesozoic Meanderings #2 1 (4): 196 pp.
Paul, G. S. (1988). "The brachiosaur giants of the Morrison and Tendaguru with a description of a new subgenus, Giraffatitan, and a comparison of the world's largest dinosaurs". Hunteria 2 (3): 1–14.

Maier, Gerhard. African dinosaurs unearthed : the Tendaguru expeditions. Bloomington, Indiana : University of Indiana Press, 2003. (Life of the Past Series).